Economics

Party On Wall Street! Larry Summers Wants to Charge People for Saving

"The Wall Street Party we've forecast continues to build. The JOBS Act is forcing new product into the IPO market. QE continues in the US, Britain and Europe. Janet Yellen and Mark Carney are not about to try to taper in any serious way. The fracking meme continues to be pursued, giving people at least the illusion of more gas and oil to stimulate another industrial boom. And now, to ensue that money flows copiously, top bankers are obviously considering negative interest rates. How do you increase consumer spending, thus contributing to the Wall Street Party about which we've regularly written? Try to increase the velocity of money any way you can." Continue reading →

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The Aden Sisters on Gold, Commodities and Near-Term Market Prospects

"We spoke a lot about gold and silver with the Aden sisters here because they are known in part for their precious metals insights. But it is interesting to see that they have 50 percent of their assets in the stock market itself and believe the market could continue its rise. We do, too. There will be no significant tapering, from what we can tell. Janet Yellen, the next Fed head, has expressed a determination to continue stimulation until the job picture brightens (which likely will never really happen). In England, Mark Carney - the Carney barker - has indicated via forward guidance that the BOE continues aggressive monetary stimulation." Continue reading →

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Ron Paul: Fed’s Yellen Dangerous For The Economy

"What does former U.S. congressman Dr. Ron Paul think about Janet Yellen as the Fed Chair? Kitco News caught up with Paul at the Metals & Minerals Conference in San Francisco, where he is a keynote speaker, to discuss monetary policy, gold and the US dollar. 'It's easy to be a critic if you don't believe they should exist,' Paul says in response to his criticisms of the Fed. Having Yellen as the next chair, Paul says not much will change. 'If anything, it'll be slightly worse because she is a very aggressive inflator...I think she'll be dangerous to the dollar and she will not revive the economy.'" Continue reading →

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Bitcoin: Experts clash over the crypto-currency

"Bitcoin is reaching new heights thanks to a combination of speculation on future value and genuine, undeniable usefulness. Think about it: Why can it take days or weeks for banks to send money around the world, when an email travels in seconds? Does the money travel by steamboat? Are they loading gold bars onto the side of a camel and sending it over the mountains of Mongolia? Of course not. The real answer is depressing - banking is a stagnant market running on long-obsolete infrastructure, which improves only when forced to by government. [..] When Metro Bank opened in 2010, it received the first new UK banking licence issued in 150 years." Continue reading →

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Economist Recommends ‘E-Dollar’ That Loses 5% Of Its Value Per Year

"'If you care at all about the future of this country, one of the things you need to realize is we need to solve the demand side so we can get back to the supply side issues that are really the tricky thing for the long run,' he said. 'The way to solve the demand side issues that is the most consistent with not messing up our supply side is monetary policy and making it so we can have negative interest rates.' At the moment, e-dollars are still only a theoretical concept, but Kimball is hopeful that they could be put into action in the near future. He believes that if a government bought in, it could be using an electronic currency in three years and reap the benefits of it soon after." Continue reading →

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Open the Window and Let Out Tedious Tapering

"The exercise of power is often a ludicrously simple thing. And Federal Reserve deliberations often partake of such simplicity. The tapering debate is yet one more example. It is symptomatic of a dialectic that everyone can understand and participate in. We are meant to examine two choices, and two choices only: Either the Fed tightens or it doesn't. Either of these choices acknowledges the primacy of the Fed and its central importance. The Fed is NOT intrinsically important. Absent the force of the state, there is no way that a tiny group of mis-educated people would be able to gather in a well-appointed room to fix the value and volume of money for hundreds of millions." Continue reading →

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The Fundamental Characteristic that Recommends Janet Yellen

"We expect an ever more emphatic stream of double-talk and market manipulations as the final acts of this tragedy play out. First, a Wall Street Party and then ... the ruinous aftermath. And throughout this scenario, the constant, delusional drip of increasingly unmoored statements about the Fed's competence and the government's efficiency generally. Somehow the eventual unwinding of these trillions shall be blamed on the private markets and as everything crashes down, those at the top will suggest a new and even more globalized system using the strategies that have created such domestic havoc." Continue reading →

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Meet Two Economists Who Can Ruin Your Retirement

"Messrs. English and Wilcox are two of the most important economists at the Federal Reserve. Their work greatly influences the Fed’s policies … and they recently presented their latest findings at the International Monetary Fund’s annual research conference. Essentially, English and Wilcox’s new research argues that the Fed should start reducing the size of its money-printing programs in the next few months. But at the same time, the economists recommend that the Fed should offset that tapering with extremely dovish guidance on interest rates. More specifically, they suggest that the Fed should promise to keep rates close to zero until 2017!" Continue reading →

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Bill Bonner: Paddywhacking

"Last week, Janet Yellen told the Senate what everyone wanted to hear: that the Fed would continue to support asset prices. With the 'Yellen put' in their pockets, investors bid up the Dow to over 16,000 by the end of the week. What to make of it? Although we have no doubt that Fed policies will prove disastrous, we have nothing but doubts about what form the disaster will take. John Williams of ShadowStats.com recalculates the Consumer Price Index, official unemployment rates and GDP figures based on more honest data and alternative methodologies. What he discovers is that the CPI is higher, unemployment is higher and the GDP is lower than the feds would have us believe." Continue reading →

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